This Side of the Fire

"In Jonathan Maule's elegiac and breathtaking poems, the speaker interrogates the self and ghosts from a violent youth. We see the edges of the horizon, gray and brown from perturbances of distant fires. We know from his lyrical and spacious poems, the fire lines are precarious, and in the breath of a caesura, the spark of their hungers may leap into the places of calm. Knowing this, Maule's speaker attempts to reconcile with his own fires, yearning to read the winds of his past and seeking a way to calm the burning within. This is an extraordinary collection. OLIVER DE LA PAZ"--